> Not just snobbery but stupid arrogant snobbery. The only permissible
> objective, historical, criteria to evaluate music are the judgments of
> performing musicians and musically literate audiences, to be confirmed (or
> rediscovered) a minimum of two generations after the death of the
> composer. The music of Sibelius, by those standards, stands up very well.
> But Adorno's?
Irrelevant. Much of Sibelius *is* kitschy. It's easy to forget, here in 2009, just how radical Adorno's musical critique was -- noone had ever studied aesthetic material with that sort of depth and commitment to history. Sure, Adorno had his elitist moments. But twelve-tone music was sort of the underground hip hop of its day -- it wasn't institutionalized and canonized until years later. In fact, the average Hollywood blockbuster sound-track still limits itself to the chromatic spectrum of late 19th century European tonality.
-- DRR